From Michelle Malkin, in a post about how Castro luvs him some Barry O:

The Clinton News Network…or the Castro News Network?  From Cuban blogger Babalu Blog:

Michael Graham, blogging at The Natural Truth, brings us this disgusting but not surprising story about how CNN coached its anchors to treat the subject of fidel castro in an early morning email today.

I can now confirm independently that not only did such an email go out, here it is in its entirety:

From: Flexner, Allison
Sent: Tuesday, February 19, 2008 7:46 AM
To: *CNN Superdesk (TBS)
Cc: Neill, Morgan; Darlington, Shasta
Subject: Castro guidance

Some points on Castro – for adding to our anchor reads/reporting:

* Please say in our reporting that Castro stepped down in a letter he wrote to Granma (the communist party daily), as opposed to in a letter attributed to Fidel Castro. We have no reason to doubt he wrote his resignation letter, he has penned numerous articles over the past year and a half.  (No need to question, huh?  So much for that journalistic instinct! - Ed.)

* Please note Fidel did bring social reforms to Cuba – namely free education and universal health care, and racial integration. in addition to being criticized for oppressing human rights and freedom of speech.  (Free “education”?  Don’t you mean “propaganda centers”? - Ed.)

* Also the Cuban government blames a lot of Cuba’s economic problems on the US embargo, and while that has caused some difficulties, (far less so than the collapse of the Soviet Union) the bulk of Cuba’s economic problems are due to Cuba’s failed economic polices. Some analysts would say the US embargo was a benefit to Castro politically – something to blame problems on, by what the Cubans call “the imperialist,” meddling in their affairs.

* While despised by some, he is seen as a revolutionary hero, especially with leftist in Latin America, for standing up to the United States.

Any questions, please call the international desk.

Allison

The sender of this email is Allison Flexner whose current position at CNN is unknown. She was a producer and has been in Cuba according to this transcript from 2000.

Smoking gun evidence about how the mainstream media and particularly CNN, which we have always referred to as the castro news network, is trying to sanitize castro’s legacy, EVEN NOW!

As if health care and education were a good enough excuse to violate human rights. We have to be fair now don’t we?

As if the regime needed any more help in getting its talking points into the MSM, they now come through official emails to journalists and anchors. We’ve often lamented the Faustian bargain that foreign news agencies have made with the castro regime in order to maintain access. When Reuters has a reporter in it’s Cuba bureau that penned 1,000 articles for the official newspaper of Communist Party U.S.A. nothing should surprise us. But it does. 

Nope…no liberal media bias!

The moonbat suicide watch is on.

After a half century of torture, oppression, snuffing out dissent, and heavy-handed pinko-style authoritarianism (to which we’ve grown accustomed from the left), Fidel Castro is hanging it up in Cuba.  He will pass on his misery machine to someone else, likely his sadistic brother Raul.

I’d like to say that the hope I’ve held for years for the people of Cuba is going to be realized, but I don’t think it will be.  Not for a while, anyway.  I firmly believe that nothing short of a revolution similar to the one that launched the malevolent Castro to power nearly 50 years ago will break the shackles of despair that chains Cuba today.

Having said that, this is a small victory for freedom lovers around the world.  Let’s hope that it continues to improve, and that Cuba moves away from a communist dictatorship to a capitalist (in whole or in part) republic.

Good news for you 9/11 conspiracy nutters (aka “Truthers”): you’ve got elite company. Your boy Fidel is a barking moonbat just like you! From NewsMax:

Ailing Cuban leader Fidel Castro said the U.S. government misinformed Americans and the world about 9/11, echoing conspiracy theories about the terror attacks against the United States six years ago.

In an essay read by a Cuban television presenter on Tuesday night, Castro said the Pentagon was hit by a rocket, not a plane, because no traces were found of its passengers.

“Today one knows there was deliberate misinformation,” wrote Castro, who has not appeared in public since July of 2006 when life-threatening surgery for a secret illness forced him to hand over power to his brother Raul Castro.
…
“We were fooled like the rest of the planet’s inhabitants,” he wrote.

That idiot Bush is so stupid that he fooled the whole planet. Dubya, you magnificent bastard!

Well, I have to say this: if there’s anything that Fidel knows much about, it’s government misinformation.

From MSNBC:

Fidel Castro claims Cuba’s government saved the life of President Reagan by giving American officials information about an assassination plot in 1984.

The essay published Wednesday in the Communist Party newspaper Granma appeared to be the first time Cuba has made the claim. It seemed aimed at showing Cuba has cooperated with the United States in the past.

Point to ponder: does this hurt Fidel’s standing with Mikie Moore and the tinfoil nutters of the left?

From al-Reuters:

Ailing Cuban leader Fidel Castro is tipping Democratic candidates Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama to team up and win the U.S. presidential election.

Clinton leads Obama in the race to be the Democratic nominee for the November 2008 election, and Castro said they would make a winning combination.

“The word today (from whom? - Ed.) is that an apparently unbeatable ticket could be Hillary for president and Obama as her running mate,” he wrote in an editorial column on U.S. presidents published on Tuesday by Cuba’s Communist Party newspaper, Granma.

Who’s your buddy, Fidel?

Castro said former President Bill Clinton was “really kind” when he bumped into him and the two men shook hands at a U.N. summit meeting in 2000. He also praised Clinton for sending elite police to “rescue” shipwrecked Cuban boy Elian Gonzalez from the home of his Miami relatives in 2000 to end an international custody battle.
…
He said his favorite U.S. president since 1959 was Jimmy Carter, another Democrat, because he was not an “accomplice” to efforts to violently overthrow the Cuban government.

The commie dictator just loves him some Democrats, doesn’t he?

From the admittedly biased Beeb:

Cuban athletes have made a hurried departure from the Pan-American games in Brazil, apparently amid fears of possible mass defections.

The delegation was rushed at short notice to Rio de Janeiro’s airport, leaving the men’s volleyball team no time to collect their bronze medals.

The athletes were said to have been ordered to leave the games before the finishing ceremony on Sunday.

It follows the defection of four Cuban athletes earlier in the tournament.
…
Cuba’s President, Fidel Castro, has already made clear his irritation over earlier defections, accusing athletes of betraying their country for money.

“Betrayal for money is one of the favourite weapons of the United States to destroy Cuba’s resistance,” he said.

Here’s guessing that these ungrateful hombres didn’t go see Moore’s new mockumentary Sicko. Don’t these ingrates know how good they have it down in that socialist worker’s “paradise”?

(Sidebar: Notice that there are always tons of Cubans risking life and limb to get out of Cuba…but you never see any kind of migration into Cuba? I’m sure that doesn’t mean anything, though.)

Sometimes, words just don’t properly convey the outrage felt, but I’m going to give it my level best. From the NY Post:

Filmmaker Michael Moore’s production company took ailing Ground Zero responders to Cuba in a stunt aimed at showing that the U.S. health-care system is inferior to Fidel Castro’s socialized medicine, according to several sources with knowledge of the trip.

The trip was to be filmed as part of the controversial director’s latest documentary, “Sicko,” an attack on American drug companies and HMOs that Moore hopes to debut at the Cannes Film Festival next month.

Two years in the making, the flick also takes aim at the medical care being provided to people who worked on the toxic World Trade Center debris pile, according to several 9/11 workers approached by Moore’s producers.

But the sick sojourn, which some say uses ill 9/11 workers as pawns, has angered many in the responder community.

“He’s using people that are in a bad situation and that’s wrong, that’s morally wrong,” railed Jeff Endean, a former SWAT commander from Morris County, N.J., who spent a month at Ground Zero and suffers from respiratory problems.
…
Regardless, some ill 9/11 workers balked at Moore’s idea.

“I would rather die in America than go to Cuba,” said Joe Picurro, a Toms River, N.J., ironworker approached by the filmmaker via an e-mail that read, “Joe and Mike in Cuba.”

After helping remove debris from Ground Zero, Picurro has a laundry list of respiratory and other ailments so bad that he relies on fund-raisers to help pay his expenses.

He said, “I just laughed. I couldn’t do it.”

Another ill worker who said he was willing to take the trip ended up being stiffed by Moore.

Michael McCormack, 48, a disabled medic who found an American flag at Ground Zero that once flew atop the Twin Towers, was all set to go to.

The film crew contacted him by phone and took him by limo from his Ridge, L.I., home to Manhattan for an on-camera interview.

“What he [Moore] wanted to do is shove it up George W’s rear end that 9/11 heroes had to go to a communist country to get adequate health care,” said McCormack, who suffers from chronic respiratory illness.

But McCormack said he was abandoned by Moore. At a March fund-raiser for another 9/11 responder in New Jersey, McCormack learned Moore had gone to Cuba without him.

“It’s the ultimate betrayal,” he said. “You’re promised that you’re going to be taken care of and then you find out you’re not. He’s trying to profiteer off of our suffering.”

The left accuses Bush and his buddies from “profiteering off of the war”, but I guess that Moore profiteering off of the suffering of 9/11 responders is A-OK.

Might I suggest that the next time Moore takes his ample posterior to Cuba, he should check out the free gastric bypass they offer? His bloated socialist mindset must be getting choked off.

By the way, here is an accurate representation of the real Cuban health care system. While the Silky Pony may be campaigning on “Two Americas”, there are “Two Cubas” when it comes to health care. Something tells me that Moore has seen only the better of the two in Castroland.

Ah, the joys of forced economic equality! From the AP:

Laura Garcia doesn’t have a car, and the change in her pocket won’t cover the 15-cent bus fare. But standing by a crumbling overpass, sweating in her shorts, sunglasses and skimpy top, the 18-year-old says a free ride is only an outstretched thumb away.

“People will take you. You can always find drivers to help,” said Garcia, who studies law in Havana and was going to see her parents in Pinar del Rio, a 90-minute ride west.

Hitchhiking is a way of life in communist Cuba, where cars are scarce, a gallon of gas costs a third of a civil servant’s monthly salary, and public transportation is unreliable and overcrowded. Lately things have worsened, with even acting President Raul Castro admitting in December that public transport was “practically on the point of collapse.”

As Winston Churchill properly noted: “The inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of blessings; the inherent virtue of socialism is the equal sharing of miseries.” In Cuba, life may suck, but at least it sucks equally for everyone, right? Indeed, misery does love company.